Voodooprojects

Chameleon => Feature Requests => Topic started by: tempolo on June 17, 2009, 11:47:36 AM

Title: Make Installer prevent accidental install to a "normal" Mac's boot disk
Post by: tempolo on June 17, 2009, 11:47:36 AM

I meant to investigate this first more, but before I totally forget it (I still have some other projects going), I better document it here, at least:

It sometimes happens that someone accidentally installs Chameleon on his Mac, making it not boot any more.

I am not sure why this happens yet, but one suspicion I have is that Chameleon overwrites the EFI Partition's first sectors, which are unused when booting OS X on a PC, but necessary for booting on a real Mac.

Thus, I propose that the Installer tries to detect this. E.g, if it's really as I think, then the check would be to see if the first two sectors where boot1h gets written contain "EFI PART" in the first 8 bytes.

But maybe this is not the right solution. In any case, please add something to avoid this accident from happening, if possible.

Title: just some info: general materials about Mac ESP (EFI) to understand the situatio
Post by: Lord Anubis on June 19, 2009, 12:57:04 AM

FYI: For people who are interested to know more about Mac partitions

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2006/tn2166.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table